Programmable Search Engine Blog
The latest news, updates and tips from the Programmable Search Engine team
New statistics page
Monday, January 22, 2007
Posted by: Matt Wytock, Software Engineer
We've added a new statistics page so you can see what people are searching for on your Custom Search Engine -- information such as overall traffic to your search engine and popular queries is now available. And you can view this info by day, week, month -- or even the entire lifetime of your search engine.
So check it out by going to the
My search engines
page and follow the "statistics" link next to the name of your search engine.
The top CSEs
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Posted by: Jennifer Hyman, Product Marketing Manager
You may have been wondering how your CSE is performing and how it compares to those other people are creating.
The first step in sharing Custom Search metrics with you is the
Most Popular list
of Custom Search Engines
, as defined by volume of queries. This list spans a variety of sites: large, small and across industries and topics. You'll see search engines built for techies, music lovers, sports fans, climate scientists, universities and more. Individual site owners and large organizations are seeing success with their CSEs.
We plan to update this list every couple of weeks so you can gauge the activity of the Custom Search community as well as how your CSE is performing. Stay tuned for more such metrics updates, too.
Happy collaborating!
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
Posted by: Vrishali Wagle, Software Engineer
We've made several improvements to the Custom Search collaboration process. Starting today, you'll be able to communicate more easily with new volunteers for your Custom Search Engine -- you'll see the email addresses of new volunteers as well as approved contributors. It's important to note that this process works both ways -- i.e., if you volunteer to contribute to a search engine, your email address will also be visible to the creator of the search engine. To see the email addresses of contributors simply go to the "Collaboration"
section of the "Control Panel" of your search engine and you will see a list of contributors emails there. You will also get email notification when your invitee accepts your invitation to contribute to your Custom Search Engine. Last but certainly not least, you can now also see the sites your contributors have added to your search engine. Visit the "Sites" tab in the "Control Panel" to see what work your contributors are doing. If you have several contributors, you'll have a drop-down menu to select which contributor you'd like to view. We hope you find these features useful in building and maintaining your CSEs.
No more extra white space after search results
Wednesday, December 6, 2006
Posted by: Matt Wytock, Software Engineer
Many of you have complained about the extra white space at the bottom of the Custom Search results hosted on your page. We've heard you, and have rolled out a fix for better integration between your search engine and the rest of your site.
Here are some examples of search results with extra white space:
sla
binary tree
And here they are with the fix:
sla
binary tree
This fix is now enabled by default on all Custom Search Engines. If you experience problems, you can revert to the old behavior by adding this line to your search results snippet:
var googleSearchResizeIframe = false;
Custom Search in your language
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Posted by: Tania Bedrax-Weiss, Software Engineer
It has always been our goal to enable anyone, anywhere create a Custom Search Engine. We're pleased to announce that we're getting closer to that goal. As of today, you can now create a Custom Search Engine for most languages and if you choose, you can give preference to results from a certain country as well. Here's how it works:
For the time being, you have to go to
http://google.com/coop/cse/
to create your search engine (in the future, we will have versions of CSE for each country). On the main CSE site, you will now however, have the option to specify the language for your Custom Search. The language you choose will set the language for the text on the search results page and give preference to results in that language. You can also choose 'All Languages' in which case the language associated with the user's browser will be used. If you want to give preference to search results from a particular domain, you can do so as pattern later on. If, for instance, you wanted your search results to only be from Japan, you would include *.jp as a pattern. (Please note the * is essential.) You can also choose to give preference to results from a certain country by changing your code to use the country specific google domain (e.g., such as
google.ru
or
google.es
as opposed to
google.com
). Please see
http://google.com/coop/docs/cse/hosting.html
for the details.
Caveats:
If your search box is on a web
page
where the character encoding is
not
utf-8, you will need to specify the correct input encoding from
the standard list.
Support is in only for left-to-right languages, right-to-left languages such as Hebrew or Arabic are not supported at this time
Making it easier to specify entire domains
Thursday, November 16, 2006
Posted by: Vrishali Wagle, Software Engineer
A number of you have asked for the ability to specify entire domains (such as all the hosts that are part of
stanford.edu
or all the sites under
ca.gov
) in your CSEs so that you can more easily build a comprehensive search engine. We listened to your feedback, and starting today you can specify such patterns in your index.
To illustrate the power of this new customization addition, we created a few interesting demo search engines for you to review.
One searches across all the US Department of Energy funded laboratories, which we're calling a
National Labs Search Engine
. Another one searches across all the Indian Institutes of Technology, which we've called the
IIT Search Engine
. Please note that these are not CSEs Google will be maintaining; rather, we wanted to show you some possible ways to use this new feature. We hope you find this new addition useful to your Custom Search efforts. Please continue to give us your
feedback
.
New CSE Role Models
Sunday, November 12, 2006
Posted by: Nikki Pfarr, User Experience Designer
You've given us some great feedback so far on the
Custom Search Engine
(CSE). In particular, many of you have requested more sophisticated examples of existing CSEs, so you can learn from and reference them. We agree that there's no better way to discover its potential than from many examples out there. In response to your requests, we've expanded our
featured examples
page. It's now filled with dozens of examples that showcase the powerful features of the Custom Search Engine. You can easily browse through a number of categories including Information, Technology, Culture, Lifestyle, Latest, and Google Picks.
This is our first pass at improving our list of example search engines. Moving forward, we plan to continually expand and improve these pages. In the meantime, stay tuned for more updates and
keep the feedback coming
. We're excited to work with you to make the Custom Search Engine an even more powerful tool.
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